Are there more communities like Flickr's ID Please?

July 27, 2009 5:50 PM

I really love the Flickr "ID Please" group, which I originally found here. Are there other services/communities online that allow you to submit a photo (or other media item) for discussion/identification by experts? This particular group tends to focus on identifying types of flora/fauna.

I have a friend who's obsessed with getting "deeper information" about his photos and other digital artifacts of travel/living for a blog.

Ask Mefi (or other, lesser, question answering sites) would be a good venue for one-off questions, but I'm interested in a place that's devoted to this kind of media request/ expert discussion.

I've found another good example on Flickr: the Translations group where people post images of non-English text for translation.

I'd love to be able to post pictures of famous people's faces, notable monuments, pieces of IKEA furniture, etc, and get comments/information from people who know these things very well.

I've thought about Amazon's Mechanical Turk for this, but that's not quite what I'm looking for, because I'm not about to teach my friend how to define Turk tasks.

Aardvark has helped me with this style of question, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for either.

posted by k7lim to technology (3 comments total)

Whatsthatbug.com is great for insect & spider IDs.

To be honest I think askmefi is the best community I've found for this purpose, especially for half-remembered books, films, and songs, but also IDing and sourcing items of clothing and even foods. It's eerie sometimes how often a correct hit comes back.
posted by Lou Stuells at 6:28 PM on July 27

Oh man, that group was not what I was expecting. I did a search for the community college I work for once, and among the hits was a student ID. Granted, we changed the design, but it makes me wonder what people are thinking. I think I saw a military ID in the guy's stream as well.

As to the question, I'm worthless. There's WhatTheFont, which lets you upload images of text and it trys to tell you what font it's rendered from.
posted by pwnguin at 1:04 AM on July 28

Not exclusively for IDs, but I have seen questions like that crop up frequently on the Wikipedia reference desks, and they almost always get a satisfactory answer.
posted by groar at 8:31 AM on July 28